[ecrea] New book: Barbara Cassin - Google Me

Wed Feb 07 16:30:43 GMT 2018

"A readable and entertaining, yet serious indictment of informational
culture. Cassin, a philosopher and renowned scholar of ancient thought,
brings a philosophical perspective to the rise of Google and its impact
on a wide range of cultural activities. Her reflections give us a
critical space to consider the cost of our acquiescence to the
quantification of culture that lies at the heart of today’s
information-driven capitalism. The result is a provocative and
potentially transformative contribution to contemporary scholarship on
Google and internet culture more generally." - Mark B. N. Hansen

“Google is a champion of cultural democracy, but without culture and
without democracy.” In this witty and polemical critique the philosopher
Barbara Cassin takes aim at Google and our culture of big data.
Enlisting her formidable knowledge of the rhetorical tradition, Cassin
demolishes the Google myth of a “good” tech company and its “democracy
of clicks,” laying bare the philosophical poverty and political naiveté
that underwrites its founding slogans: “Organize the world’s
information,” and “Don’t be evil.” For Cassin, this conjunction of
globalizing knowledge and moral imperative is frighteningly similar to
the way American demagogues justify their own universalizing mission
before the world.

While sensitive to the possibilities of technology and to Google’s
playful appeal, Cassin shows what is lost when a narrow worship of
information becomes dogma, such that research comes to mean data mining
and other languages become provincial “flavors” folded into an
impoverished Globish, or global English.

*Barbara Cassin* is Director of Research at the CNRS in Paris and
President of the Collège International de Philosophie. Her /Dictionary
of Untranslatables/ has been adapted into five languages, and her
/Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home?/ won the 2015 French Voices Grand
Prize. Her most recent book to appear in English is /Heidegger: His Life
and His Philosophy/ (coauthored with Alain Badiou).